Unaccounted for or unidentified inventory reduction events, referred to as shrinkage that occurs in retail, wholesale and commercial establishments is a growing concern. It has been estimated that more than seventy percent of all inventory shrinkage is the direct result of employees either alone, or acting in concert with one or more persons taking inventory from their places of work. A typical inventory reduction (e.g. shrinkage) event involves an employee and an accomplice posing as a patron. For example, the accomplice approaches a cashier with a shopping cart containing merchandise. The cashier takes an item, for example, a high value item such as a camcorder or other electronic device from the shopping cart and pretends to pass it over the item checking scanner coupled to the cash register. In fact, the cashier does not pass the item over the scanner, and returns the item to the cart without registering the transaction. The accomplice leaves the store with the non-scanned item; thereby, resulting in an unaccounted for reduction in inventory.
Another common shrinkage situation occurs in automobile dealerships where multiple personnel may have access to car and truck keys. In these situations, salespersons and other dealership personnel, for example, mechanics that have access to car and truck keys, for example, under the pretext of engaging in a test drive, take a car or truck off the lot and do not return it. The car or truck leaving the lot does not seem unusual as salespersons perform such act several times during the day in the attempt to make a sale or mechanics taking cars from the showroom or lot to a maintenance area. Over time, such events are not noticed given the size of a typical auto dealer sales force.
A conventional way to track and monitor inventory is to use surveillance cameras to monitor the warehouse or other commercial establishment. The surveillance cameras are typically placed at or near the entry points of establishments. The video taken by the surveillance cameras is often stored in a high resolution format. A drawback with such an approach is that the higher the video resolution, the greater the amount of memory required to maintain the images. Memory can be the most expensive portion of a surveillance system. Thus, many owners are reluctant to use high resolution video to monitor their establishments.
Another conventional way to track and monitor inventory is to have a person actively watch the video feed in real time. In addition to human error, the amount of video that has to be watched to prevent an inventory reduction event in real time, or in review time after the event has occurred to determine when the event occurred and what merchandise was taken can be prohibitive. In this situation, as with the video surveillance scenario, the amount of video to be reviewed requires a tremendous expenditure in memory.
Another conventional way to monitor and track inventory is to use bar codes or other suitable identification mechanisms to track how many items are present within a given location during a period of time. Depending on the number of bits contained in the bar code, the specifics of the item (e.g. what warehouse it is stored in or other pertinent physical information) can be retrieved, for example, through the use of handheld devices. A drawback with this approach is that it only monitors gross inventory (e.g. how many of a particular type of products are present within a given location or several locations); it does not provide any information about a particular item. For example, the bar code method provides the ability to determine how many of a particular type of product are present in a given location or series of locations, but the method does not provide the ability to track or provide information about a specific item.